Weaving through distractions

It's been a week of distractions..

First, I had offered to make up a display board for the local Weaver's and Spinner's guild recent demo. It took longer than I had expected. Among other things, I changed my vision halfway through, which is not a good idea. I dragged my wheel and the inkle loom to the demo as well. When I dug out the little loom, I realized it had a half finished band on it and the warp had stretched. It took a bit, but I wove it off and re-warped it just in time for the demo. Now just to get this band off and ready for the next inkle project which will be a strap for a felted bag.

The bag is the loom waste of the shawl project. I had a bit of the weft thread leftover, so I just did plain weave all the way to the end of the warp. Off the loom, the tabby was a firm fabric which really had little drape to it. After sewing it up, I tossed it in the washer and watched it carefully so that it would full up enough but not too much. I almost got distracted and let it go on a bit too far, but it's still good. Hopefully this week, I'll be able to pop a lining in it and once the strap is woven, it will be a nice, albeit somewhat small bag.

The shawl is off the loom. I'm really happy with it. It turned out as nice as I'd hoped for, even nicer perhaps. It's soft and drapey and the colour combinations worked as I'd envisioned them as well. Going with the twill, used more yarn and thus a bit of a narrower shawl, but it was the right decision. It is a much nicer piece than if I'd used a tabby weave. Of course I could be biased, since I am rather fond of twills anyway...

Then of course, were several beautiful days when I dragged my pup out to snuffle in the sun's glorious rays, while I squelched through the melting snow and mud with intentions of picking up sticks and other bits. He did make things a bit more difficult at times when he noticed I had some of the larger sticks in my grasp. He would jump up and bite the sticks and nudge my hand. Apparently larger sticks are to be thrown and retrieved rather than put in the ever growing pile of sticks.

My girlfriend, who lives halfway around the world, sent a Christmas pressie, which due to a timing delay, got here on Monday.. Isn't it pretty! It's soft, squishy, beautiful, yummy sock yarn in a very pretty colourway. I found a set of sock needles for sale from someone's stash at a spin-in today, so I nabbed them so I could have two pair of socks on the go at once. My rule is finish the pair on the needles before I start a new pair, so that the single sock doesn't languish forever in some sort of sock void. However, I had no rules about 2 pair of socks being knit at the same time. That's not cheating too much is it?

We unfortunately missed Winter War. This time we realized we'd not had a day out just to ourselves in a while, so we took the day to do some running around to various places to do some planning, research and window shopping. We went to various stores looking for various kitchen design ideas. We were supposed to go out for lunch, but the restaurant we chose closes between lunch and dinner. We'd missed the window of opportunity so headed home. On the way, DH decided to pop into a local car dealership to do some of the research. We've been planning a second vehicle for a while and one on our list was in the lot that day. We went for a bit of a test drive - always fun.... and picked up this today :) Not quite the little run about I'd anticipated....